Re: Drew Smith - Smoke And Mirrors
Re: Drew Smith - Smoke And Mirrors
Drew Smith found himself in the same position as many independent musicians trying to make a living in the struggling music business. He had no record label to underwrite his career, no publicity machine to get his music into listeners’ hands and not enough money to make a music video.
](music video: Latest News & Videos, Photos about music video | The Economic Times - Page 1) So he followed the route of big business and outsourced the video to India. Last October, Smith contracted a dance school in Bangalore to make a video for his song, featuring Bollywood-style choreography and Indian actors dressed as Hindu demigods and tossing colored festival powders.
The production values may be a little amateurish by MTV standards, but for $2,000 it cost a fraction of the budget for a professional film. And Smith has attracted music’s most important currency: attention. Since being posted to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=(http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/IBM) contracted to an Indian company in 2005 - that were once considered unexportable. Companies in the West often claim that while they outsource factory jobs, the creative and innovative work is still done at home.
“You hear so much about big corporations outsourcing,” Smith said by phone on a break from his day job teaching English to immigrants in Hamilton, Ontario. “I was just trying to think of a unique way to release the album and promote it.”
While outsourcing was once viewed strictly as a cost-cutting privilege of giant corporations, it is increasingly available to smaller companies and even individuals.
“Multinational corporations are now more willing to experiment and take risks with outsourcing to India, and, as a result, there is a lot of sophisticated work being done there,” said Shehzad Nadeem, an assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College, and the author of “Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves.” “But by sheer numbers it is dwarfed by the more rote and routine work the companies export.”
Entertainment businesses outsource some work, such as nonunion orchestras in Eastern Europe recording film scores, but the bulk of creative work is done close to home and in the hubs of New York, LA and Nashville.
Smith’s video shows the production technologies available to even the lowest-profile musicians, who now routinely stitch together recordings shuttled across the Internet from home studios around the planet. “This is where it’s going,” said Adam Dorn, a producer and musician who records under the name Mocean Worker.
“People are always going to go where they need to go, and as the major labels crumble and budgets go away, you just have to roll up your sleeves and get things done.”
Dorn himself chose to use a Polish student to do the 1930s-style animation for his video “Shake Ya Boogie” five years ago, after American filmmakers quoted
Re: Drew Smith - Smoke And Mirrors
Only $2000!!! :k: